yet we all live in the same world saturated by images which communicate a specific standard of beauty. there is more conformity than you think...

Really? How much conformity do you think I think there is? How do you know?

But so what? I think that's good, suckers can keep their conformity, if that means they are conforming to someone else's idea of what is beautiful. Friends will sometimes refer to someone they think is attractive and I'll think wow, I don't agree at all, but I like this other person over here who nobody seems to have noticed. I think that's great! Also I find that notions of 'beauty' and a certain aesthetic quality don't always overlap with attractiveness / hotness, sometimes they are mutually exclusive.

i want to live where you live then.

I find the presence of a real person in 4D smellovision to be much more appealing than any image. Just can't really get a sense of someone from a photo. Also I don't think there's anyone particularly great looking on this thread. OK a few. But I like realness really.

I find the presence of a real person in 4D smellovision to be much more appealing than any image. Just can't really get a sense of someone from a photo. Also I don't think there's anyone particularly great looking on this thread. OK a few. But I like realness really.

hmm sure everyone says that sort of thing and it's true, but then i think you saw someone like lara stone in real life it would probably fuck with your head.

No I don't like that look at all, she's rank. I'd want to punch that face.

gosh you're a real charmer!

anyway i said like, ie very good loooking people are quite breathtaking to look at, i've seen a few really good looking famous people in the flesh and they're usually REALLY good looking, you know in a magazine they're always next to very good looking people anyway, next to me and you their looks are magnified. I saw kylie minogue in a club once, madonna too, and it was really suprising just how attractive they were in comparison to everyone else in the room.

I'm sensing a pattern, Tea...brunettes with prominent brows. Actually I like your taste in women.

Lara Stone is very haute couture. She has a Grace Jones disco-crazy thing about her too. I think my bf would have a crush on her. I sure do.

Zhao, I think the media promotes a certain standard of beauty that's taken as an "ideal"--usually white Anglo-Saxon features, or "colored" people with features that fit best within this mold-- but if you look at what people actually find attractive, and what biological factors end up playing a huge role (people who look good to you on film may not be attractive at all in person, or in bed, etc.) in "pair bonding", these two don't always have that much to do with one another. Like where I used to live, where people don't have money and AIDS and drugs are real problems, I was considered disgustingly thin and grotesque by most people. Whereas in a white community I'm still within average range in size (although I have had white strangers tell me I need to gain weight, which is really fucking presumptuous and rude). Basically the "everything is cultural" model of psychosexual attraction is just another form of cheap reductionism.

I've noticed, having known models, that there's a certain set of traits that look good on camera that don't necessarily translate in real life. For example, a lot of them have abstractly beautiful faces with large eyes and mouth (like, e.g., Angelina Jolie) in pictures, but in person they like one of those bobble-head toys because their heads are disproportionately large. Symmetry helps, and there are evolutionary benefits to looking symmetrical--basically it means as a zygote you were strong and resilient against outside forces, and made exact mirror image copies throughout fetal development.

The older I get and the more experience I have with sexual subcultures, the more convinced I am that the media's "ideals" and standards bear little resemblence to what excites people in real life. And that what people see when the look at the same face or body can be very different based on all kinds of factors--cultural, personal, biological...